Critical and Cultural Studies: Three potential themes for dissertation

Critical and Cultural Studies

Three potential themes l have highlighted for my dissertation:

·         1.  ILLUSTRATING EMOTIONAL ISSUES IN CHILDREN’S BOOKS: How can emotional issues be addressed effectively in children’s literature without being too graphic or unnecessarily upsetting? (“Children are tough, though we tend to think of them as fragile. They have to be tough. Childhood is not easy. We sentimentalize children, but they know what’s real and what’s not. They understand metaphor and symbol. If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.” (Sendak, in Stopera, 2012).  How useful is this in tackling sensitive subject matter in the illustration of children’s books?

The theme relates to my own practice as this is an area l seek to become engaged in upon graduation.  I wish to explore the ways in which children’s books address emotional issues and how effective or not different approaches are.  This l can apply to my own practice because l plan to produce my own books on these themes.  Although a genre of books in the last decade or so has emerged to tackle issues often considered as being ‘modern problems’ such as divorce, single gender relationships or bullying for example, I feel children’s emotional issues are overlooked in the main, with most picture books aiming at the fantasy genre.  Although there is clearly a well deserved and necessarily place for fantasy themed picture books, children have many of the emotional issues that adults do, and books addressing these complex issues need to be readily available to enable children to talk about their problems or get help dealing with them.  These books can also be used by adults to help them view their own childhoods in a more reflective manner, which can help them in dealing with their own issues.  Pros in studying this theme include it being directly related to my own interest in this genre and its relation to my practice with the cons including the lack of ‘upsetting’ examples as opposed to ones that are more sensitively illustrated.  So how would l approach this?  Would l need to compare ‘sentimental’ picture books with those addressing more serious subjects?  This would mean l would be comparing two very different themes aimed at possibly two audiences.  Although sensitive themes can be touched upon in many books, even of the fantasy genre, as sub plots for example, they are often too subtle to be able to provide a suitable comparison.  This theme offers a wide range of sources but it would be difficult to pinpoint a specific angle to take on this and decide what exactly l could conclude from the study.

·         2.  WORDLESS VS. TEXTUAL PICTURE BOOKS? Are wordless picture books or those with text more or less effective at communicating the required message to the target audience?

I have spent a while writing stories for children and studied the ways in which stories use structure, prose, poetry and rhythm so help the story flow and keep children engaged, and found this very useful in seeing how successful picture books work and why ‘unsuccessful’ ones don’t work.  Writing the story l wanted to tell helped me to realise that, in fact my story didn’t benefit from the words and that the story could best be told solely by using pictures.  I found many examples of wordless picture books and graphic novels from which l can draw inspiration and these will help me in analyzing the theme should l choose this topic for further research.  Wordless picture books are successful (when done well), in communicating to a larger audience as the reader doesn’t have to be able to read words or understand the language in print.  However careful consideration must be given to the illustrations and how they tell the story, and whether they are clear enough to the ‘reader’.  Producing a successful wordless picture book is, for this reason, l believe much more of a challenge than producing one with text.  l would also argue that a higher level of redundancy over entropy needs to be used in order for the reader to gain a fuller insight into the unfolding events.  Pros of studying this theme include being able to directly relate it to an area of interest l have in creating my own wordless picture books, and cons being possibly that there are many more primary sources available for textual picture books than of wordless ones.

·         3.  MOTHERS AND HOW THEY ARE DEPICTED IN CHILDREN’S BOOKS:  Using various methods of critical analysis (e.g. redundancy and entropy, iconography and iconology, sterotypes etc.) the essay will look at the role of mothers in children’s books and how they are presented / illustrated to children, and how this relates to the wider ideological view in society.

It could be argued that our society reveres mothers and views them as being icons of selflessness and sacrifice where her children are concerned.  However many victims of abuse or neglect from their mothers are well aware that this is a fallacy; an ideology ingrained in society which is rarely challenged.  Looking at stereotypes here, as well as binary opposites and ideological inference can help to identify where these ideologies came from and how they can be confronted.  Children’s books, l believe invariably show mothers as being tender, loving and caring beings who would do anything for their children, but is this just a necessary ‘comfort blanket’ for adults and for children? and should ‘new versions’ of mother be allowed to emerge?  Where mothers are seen as being bad, they are almost always described as ‘step’ mothers (e.g. Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, etc.) which again, while stereotyping mothers positively, categorises step mothers in a negative sense.  Pros of this theme include being able to critically analyse using a variety of methods of deconstruction and theories as mentioned above which can also be applied to my Final Major Project module which has reference to this issue in the illustrations.  Cons of this theme could be difficulty in reaching conclusive answers about whether the mother stereotype should be challenged / changed, as if this hasn’t happened already, we don’t know whether it will be successful or not.

So now l need to decide which of these l can relate most to my own practice as well as which l feel has most potential for research.